If Books Could Kill - The Clash of Civilizations

00:00:00.280 Peter. Michael. Have you ever heard of a book called Clash of Civilizations?

00:00:04.940 I have heard of it. Clash of Civilizations, one of my favorite video games.

00:00:09.020 I'm excited to find out they made a book.

00:00:11.400 tell me about your relationship with this book what do you know about it i actually do know a

00:00:30.800 little bit about it if you were a professor of international affairs when the cold war ended

00:00:37.280 You were contractually obligated to write an entire book explaining why you think you should still be employed.

00:00:43.440 This is Samuel Huntington's attempt.

00:00:46.560 You never had to read it in school?

00:00:47.800 There's a huge difference between me being told I should read something or have to read something and actually reading it.

00:00:52.920 So it's quite possible.

00:00:54.360 The reason that I ask is that one of the first things that I learned while I was researching this is that Clash of Civilizations is one of the 10 most assigned books at U.S. colleges.

00:01:04.280 Wow.

00:01:04.560 Among top colleges, among like Ivy League colleges, it's number four.

00:01:08.400 It's just below Plato, but it's above Aristotle and Democracy in America by de Tocqueville.

00:01:14.680 I'm upset and disappointed to hear that international affairs and political science academics are not seriously pursuing truth and are instead championing the hack work of their colleagues, mentors and friends.

00:01:28.540 This is shocking.

00:01:29.640 So what do you what do you know about Huntington himself?

00:01:31.540 Now, this is all from memory. So give me a little rope here. But I believe that he was a big time international affairs academic, also a statesman. One of those guys who like went to Harvard or Yale back in like 1918. And then that's enough to just sort of be in government or a near government for the rest of your life.

00:01:52.120 Yeah, he goes to the University of Chicago. He gets his PhD from Harvard in 1951. And then there's a little tiny interregnum period. But then he becomes a Harvard professor and he stays there for 58 years. He's sort of like a walking who's who of every single intellectual movement of the 20th century.

00:02:10.540 Like, he's friends with Francis Fukuyama.

00:02:12.680 He's friends with Chef Brzezinski, Henry Kissinger.

00:02:16.200 He founded Foreign Policy Magazine.

00:02:18.840 He worked for LBJ.

00:02:20.680 According to one thing that I read, he is the most cited political scientist in America for, like, many, many years.

00:02:27.340 That makes sense to me.

00:02:28.400 And, again, I'm someone who didn't try very hard in school, and I still remember his name.

00:02:33.980 So I think that says a lot.

00:02:35.120 The book itself comes out in 1996. And the background to the book is this period that

00:02:41.880 we touched on briefly with Fukuyama and the end of history, basically from like the mid 1980s

00:02:47.580 until the early 2000s. Everybody was coming out with their like, what happens after the Cold War

00:02:53.880 book? Yeah, like, I think it was just a very fertile time for takes that we have all forgotten

00:02:58.700 about, because most of these predictions did not come true. Like, apparently, there was a famous

00:03:02.380 book about how the post-Cold War world was going to be defined by like America versus

00:03:08.240 drug cartels, that like organized crime was going to be like the next Cold War. 0.99

00:03:13.160 There was a lot of just weird cockamamie shit bouncing around at the time. 0.97

00:03:16.640 I would have read that book, honestly. 0.97

00:03:17.940 So the book itself, first, it started as a 1992 lecture at the American Enterprise Institute,

00:03:24.880 obviously.

00:03:25.840 And just like Fukuyama, it began as an article with a question mark.

00:03:30.520 so it started as the clash of civilizations and then in 1996 when he expands into a book it's

00:03:37.300 the clash of civilizations so are you are you aware like the core thesis of the book i know

00:03:42.320 a couple things about it one is i think that he was saying that the future conflicts the next big

00:03:49.500 conflicts will be between cultures not nations the part of the book that's sort of discussed the most

00:03:56.060 is that he talks about islam that like yes the western values v islam is the next big thing yes

00:04:03.780 most of the book is him laying out this idea that now that the cold war is over we can finally 0.63

00:04:09.660 reckon with the rise of identities he explicitly describes like a much more violent much more

00:04:16.240 conflictual world in the future does he have a basis for saying that we are diverging that like

00:04:22.240 our identities are in these certain areas are getting stronger or is it just sort of that he's

00:04:28.220 just like spitballing this peter thank you i'm this transitions perfectly into the quote that

00:04:33.280 i was going to send you i'm i'm sending you the first four paragraphs of the first chapter all

00:04:39.300 right the years after the cold war witnessed the beginnings of dramatic changes in people's

00:04:44.600 identities and the symbols of those identities global politics began to be reconfigured along

00:04:50.220 cultural lines. On April 18th, 1994, 2,000 people rallied in Sarajevo, waving the flags of Saudi

00:04:58.060 Arabia and Turkey. By flying those banners instead of UN, NATO, or American flags, these Sarajevans

00:05:05.260 identified themselves with their fellow Muslims and told the world who were their real and not so 0.99

00:05:09.840 real friends. On October 16th, 1994, in Los Angeles, 70,000 people marched beneath a sea of 0.94

00:05:18.300 Mexican flags protesting Proposition 187, a referendum which would deny many state benefits

00:05:24.600 to illegal immigrants and their children. Why are they walking down the street with a Mexican flag

00:05:29.440 and demanding this country give them a free education, observers asked. They should be 0.99

00:05:33.920 waving the American flag. These flag displays ensured victory for Proposition 187, which was

00:05:40.220 approved by 59% of California voters. In the post-Cold War world, flags count, and so do other

00:05:48.260 symbols of cultural identity, including crosses, crescents, and even head coverings, because

00:05:53.520 culture counts. And cultural identity is what is most meaningful to most people.

00:05:59.360 Other than the sparkling prose, what do you think?

00:06:01.920 I mean, I would love to do an entire podcast about that prose, which really fucked with my brain

00:06:06.200 in a way I'm not accustomed to. So I'm noticing some little anecdotes being spun into

00:06:14.680 uh symbols of world historical importance another thing that jumps out to me is what seems to be a

00:06:22.360 pretty casual xenophobia what the thing about how it's mexicans fault that california voters

00:06:27.220 took their rights away blaming mexicans for having their rights taken away uh because they

00:06:31.840 were protesting too mean not great saying that muslims were announcing who their real and not

00:06:38.180 so real friends were based on whose flags they were waving seems like a dramatic inference to

00:06:43.500 make. I know. You know, saying something like cultural identity is what is most meaningful to

00:06:48.680 most people. That feels like a quantifiable statement of some kind. And yet I do not see

00:06:54.240 it being quantified. Yes. You touched on like one of the main hallmarks of the book, which is that

00:06:59.460 he makes a series of sweeping statements and then he gives as evidence, like, here's these two

00:07:06.280 random things that have nothing to do with each other. Are you sure? Are you sure that people not

00:07:12.640 waving the un flag is not a super important development that we should be digging into

00:07:17.680 i usually usually you go to a protest and there's un flags everyone's waving

00:07:22.160 this is like a little example of the way that he uses evidence in this book but to try to take his

00:07:30.720 argument seriously so his claim is that the fault lines of conflict are going to be quote unquote

00:07:37.180 civilizations so if this is your argument obviously the first thing you have to do is like

00:07:42.400 define a civilization the definition that he gives is it's the biggest we that every person has

00:07:50.200 so you are from new york so you have like some sort of new york identity you probably have some

00:07:57.820 like new york state identity you feel sort of more tied to people that live in buffalo than

00:08:03.120 who live in albuquerque probably you probably have some like east coast pride like west coasters are

00:08:09.420 weird Marianne Williamson people and like you're a more down to earth tell it like it is guy like

00:08:13.520 there's probably some sort of identity in there right yeah I'm an Eric Adams guy I say that about 0.99

00:08:18.540 you all the time and then zooming out one more level you probably have some like American shit 0.93

00:08:22.580 you could also say at the at the sort of most zoomed out level you also probably consider 0.98

00:08:27.180 yourself a citizen of like the west like whatever that means right like the the war in Ukraine is

00:08:33.300 probably more likely to like hit you in the fields than like the bombing in Yemen or something sure

00:08:38.820 That's really what he means by civilization is that, like, everybody has all of these overlapping identities.

00:08:44.720 And basically when you take them up to their highest level of abstraction, that's where you find, like, a small number of civilizations globally that essentially everybody falls under one of these categories.

00:08:56.640 OK. OK.

00:08:58.200 You don't sound convinced.

00:08:59.120 Well, I mean, that's one of those things that is not objectionable in like the general sense.

00:09:06.060 Yeah.

00:09:06.260 But also too abstract to build like a really coherent thesis around.

00:09:11.180 It's one of those things where it's like, yeah, you know, that probably exists as a concept.

00:09:16.360 Yeah.

00:09:16.540 We all contain probably, I don't know, seven, 12 identities.

00:09:21.060 Right.

00:09:21.240 Those identities can be activated when certain things happen in the world or, you know, tell us to support certain political candidates for whatever reason.

00:09:29.120 etc the fact that those things exist i think is actually fairly unobjectionable this is the

00:09:33.460 problem that all these grand historical narrative attempts have in common right they're just trying

00:09:39.240 to split these like probably real but still complex overlapping people and things uh into

00:09:47.180 like clean and distinct categories right and it's not something you can readily do right and he's

00:09:54.500 also making it like the most important driver and the most important explanation for like all world

00:10:01.800 conflicts so okay i'm gonna send you actual map the actual civilizations oh wow there's some real

00:10:10.740 outliers here okay okay so this is the world divided by color color coded into what i believe

00:10:18.240 of our civilizations you have western which is uh western europe u.s and canada you have

00:10:26.460 latin american which is almost everything below that you have islamic which is just a broad 0.69

00:10:34.280 paintbrush across north africa and the middle east and then you have like east asia divvied 0.75

00:10:40.340 up into a bunch of different cultures sinic buddhist hindu and then um in the uh sort of

00:10:49.220 russian sphere the former soviet union is labeled orthodox and uh finally you have japan which is 0.98

00:10:59.080 its own civilization this is where i lost my fucking mind oh my god that's so fucking funny 0.83

00:11:05.880 china and japan are just their own civilizations he's like i'm not gonna try to figure this 0.98

00:11:10.300 one out i have no evidence for this i imagine that his thought process is something like well

00:11:15.540 like you can't put japan with china right because like these are very distinct cultures they were

00:11:20.380 at war he's like okay so we're gonna carve off japan but then in the chinese civilization which

00:11:25.420 he calls cynic he throws in north korea oh yeah and it looks like vietnam too as soon as he carves 0.73

00:11:32.000 off japan i'm like you should carve off all the countries the latin the like giant latin american

00:11:37.120 lump and then the like the fact that west african countries and iran are in are in the same 0.71

00:11:44.080 civilization according to this just because they're muslim no differences you gotta be 0.95

00:11:47.860 fucking kidding me with this this is another thing that i also don't think gets enough attention is 0.86

00:11:52.180 the fact that a lot of these civilizations are described in different ways so like there's like 0.97

00:11:56.720 buddhist hindu orthodox right those are religious distinctions but then he's got africa which is a

00:12:03.460 geographic distinction. And then he's got the West, right? There's a really good critique of

00:12:08.260 him that talks about his conception of the West, that most of the things that he talks about as

00:12:11.960 defining the West, like rule of law and free rights and all this kind of stuff. That's a lot

00:12:16.400 of countries. Like the things that he says are unique about the West, a huge number of other

00:12:22.100 countries should then fall into the West. Like South Korea should absolutely be in the West by 0.84

00:12:26.360 that definition. Right. One of the other things that I noticed while I was like, you know, zooming 0.92

00:12:30.520 in on various parts of this is that there's there's 14 different countries where he's split

00:12:35.840 them in the middle and he said that like like sudan is part islamic and part african but like

00:12:42.880 if what he's trying to explain is foreign policy like the way that countries act on the world stage

00:12:49.280 you can't just say that one country is two because then by that definition then like most countries

00:12:54.960 would be two or three or four or five depending on like various immigrant groups that they have

00:12:59.180 histories. Right. As as soon as you start chopping up the identities in any given country, all of a

00:13:05.420 sudden you have to concede that that identities don't really map onto borders perfectly. And

00:13:09.960 perhaps you should be using another framework entirely. Right. And like every country is a

00:13:14.980 bunch of squabbling interest groups. Yeah. It should be fairly intuitive that that's a stupid

00:13:19.720 way to do this. Yes. He doesn't say this in the book, but I think as a result of getting all of 1.00

00:13:26.280 these critiques of the original article he comes up with a bunch of sub groups of civilizations

00:13:31.600 in each civilization there are member states core states lone countries cleft countries and torn

00:13:40.760 countries the core countries is like really self-explanatory it's like the main country so

00:13:46.280 like china is the main country of the cynic civilization he's then got this thing of the 0.60

00:13:51.280 cleft country. So something like Ukraine is a cleft country, like it's halfway in between

00:13:56.540 the West and the Orthodox civilization. A torn country is like something like Turkey. 0.63

00:14:03.960 It has one foot in the Islamic world, but then there are large political movements trying to

00:14:09.560 transform it into something that is more Western. And then there's lone countries where he says,

00:14:16.220 like haiti is a lone country where like africa doesn't really want it and like south america

00:14:21.840 doesn't really want it either like it doesn't fit easily into either one of those categories and like

00:14:25.940 it's its own thing okay there's of course inter-civilizational conflicts right like

00:14:30.440 civilizations fighting with each other but there's also intra-civilizational conflicts

00:14:34.140 where countries are fighting over like who is going to be the core country basically he's done

00:14:40.740 the sort of the responsible scholar thing where he's acknowledged all of these caveats, right?

00:14:46.420 He said that like, yeah, you know, civilizations can change over time. And like, they have blurry

00:14:50.660 borders. And there's all these subgroups within them. And like, not every conflict is between

00:14:55.480 civilizations. Obviously, I'm oversimplifying an unreal amount to the point where anything I say

00:15:00.740 from here on in is completely useless. Exactly. But let's plow forward. So you're like 300 pages

00:15:06.200 into this book. And you're like, what is the point of this book then? If China goes to war

00:15:11.140 with Iran, it's like, oh, it's like the Cynic civilization versus the Muslim civilization. 1.00

00:15:15.760 Ooh, he's right. But then if China goes to war with Vietnam, a neighboring country, it's like, 1.00

00:15:20.900 oh, it's an intercivilizational fight. What is an event on the world stage that this wouldn't

00:15:26.880 explain? Right. So he puts out an essay that's basically like, oh, there are these different

00:15:30.780 civilizations. And then a bunch of people are like, well, what about like intercivilizational

00:15:34.680 conflicts and so he's like oh good point i'll just put a chapter on that in my book right so

00:15:39.560 like every possible caveat has an avenue yes your thesis is again so abstract and so riddled with

00:15:46.980 caveats that it just doesn't fucking mean anything right why not drill down to the to the individual 0.93

00:15:53.220 level at this point right fuck it this is another thing is that like by the time he's come up with 0.98

00:15:57.900 these categories of like cleft country lone country core country it's like well then we're 0.97

00:16:01.580 just back to countries right the civilizational framework is supposed to be an alternative

00:16:05.860 to talking about countries acting in their national interest right like paraguay does stuff

00:16:11.120 because of like specific things happening in paraguay and then this guy comes along and he's

00:16:15.800 like no no no paraguay does things because it's latin american right but then he breaks up latin

00:16:22.000 america into all of these subgroups where it's like actually paraguay is a cleft country it's

00:16:26.880 Like, yeah, that's what I said in the first place.

00:16:29.100 Paraguay is doing Paraguay stuff.

00:16:31.160 It should be sort of transparently obvious to anyone just glancing at this, that someone

00:16:35.300 who's like writing a 400 page book and just going like region by region, country by country

00:16:40.780 and giving descriptions of them is not an expert in any given thing that he talks about.

00:16:45.540 Oh, yeah.

00:16:45.780 Instead, they're just sort of like crafting a language that allows them to talk about

00:16:50.620 this stuff as if they are experts, right?

00:16:52.660 Right.

00:16:53.040 Oh, you're talking about Ukraine.

00:16:54.700 That's a cleft country. 0.98

00:16:56.100 Right.

00:16:56.240 It's like talking points for different countries when you're at like the big international affairs meeting in Washington, D.C.

00:17:02.980 Exactly.

00:17:03.640 Another thing that I came across in one of the critiques of him that I think is actually really insightful is also that he points out, I think correctly, that all of us have all of these overlapping identities, right?

00:17:16.240 But the core of his thesis is that the identity at the highest level of abstraction is the strongest.

00:17:23.620 if you want to understand africans like their african identity is much more powerful to them

00:17:29.520 than like any sub identities but when you think about actual world conflicts and the way that

00:17:35.200 like most of world history has happened it's exactly the opposite right if it comes down to

00:17:39.700 like one of my more proximate identities and this like super abstract highest order identity i'm

00:17:45.260 going to pick the proximate identity every time am i overthinking this or isn't the highest order

00:17:49.800 identity just like being a citizen of the earth he has like a he has like a sentence on that he

00:17:54.400 says it's like civilizations are the highest order of identification before human being okay i mean

00:18:00.100 but that's also a good point because like if we're talking about the highest order of abstraction

00:18:03.640 the highest order of abstraction is human being right even though syria is not necessarily in

00:18:09.200 quote-unquote the west and like maybe i have closer ties mentally to ukraine than to syria

00:18:14.720 it's not that like all of a sudden like my my allegiance to the ukraine is really really strong

00:18:19.720 and then my allegiance to Syria is non-existent.

00:18:23.500 Right. I mean, there's something in this thesis that is actually a question of psychology.

00:18:29.580 In what circumstances is a given identity sort of triggered and prioritized in a person's mind,

00:18:35.920 right? There's research on this and it's a little bit weird to talk about it as a completely

00:18:41.160 abstract thing. It's clearly more complicated than that. And not just that, but like you're

00:18:46.320 gonna need data you know you're gonna need data if you want to make these claims but peter some

00:18:51.180 mexicans were marching with a flag didn't you read the paragraph about the mexicans sorry i

00:18:56.760 forgot about all the data i've been given already so the next like after he defines all of these

00:19:02.740 civilizations he then gets into like his vision of the future okay so first of all the west is

00:19:08.860 like fading okay even though the cold war is over and we won all these other countries have developed

00:19:15.040 He specifically talks about indigenization, where basically all of these countries, after they've thrown off the shackles of colonialism, are like getting a lot more confident.

00:19:24.440 China is becoming this like big economic powerhouse and there's African countries that are like taking on a more African identity and forming trade relationships within themselves, right?

00:19:34.680 I think this is true, right?

00:19:36.000 That like post-colonialism, a lot of countries started to have like national pride in a way that was like literally illegal in a lot of places before that, right?

00:19:44.060 There's there's a weird dynamic in that I saw in Fukuyama's book, too.

00:19:49.060 These guys came up during an era where international affairs from the United States perspective was just bullying everyone.

00:19:57.160 Yes. And then we're sort of entering this period where that's a little bit harder to do.

00:20:02.660 Smaller countries are accruing political and economic power.

00:20:07.260 these guys the huntingtons of the world are like gazing out upon all of this and thinking like 0.87

00:20:12.640 yeah this is fucking annoying right like yeah this why can't i want to do you know i want the 0.98

00:20:18.860 us to be able to do whatever it wants that's how we've been going about our our shit and now we 0.96

00:20:23.940 can't and it's fucking annoying and no one's saying thank you i want to do the bad stuff and 0.95

00:20:28.100 yet here you are telling me it's bad this is the part of the book where he completely abandons 0.94

00:20:34.300 his civilizational framework. So he does all of this groundwork to talk about like the Latin

00:20:40.400 American civilization, the Buddhist civilization. And then he never talks about them again,

00:20:45.060 because he says that once he's established all of these civilizations, he says the real threat

00:20:49.800 comes from two places, Asia and the Middle East. What about cartels?

00:20:55.780 He's leaving cartels on the table. Come on. A lot of the book actually focuses on like the threat

00:21:00.640 from asia it's just like the the sort of general fears about like japan you know buying up a bunch

00:21:06.620 of american companies like being better at business than us he keeps saying that like you

00:21:11.060 know asia is going to want to impose asian values which he always puts in quote marks but then he

00:21:16.060 never actually says like what those values are or like why they're bad right and of course the

00:21:21.160 second part of that is that islamic societies are becoming more fundamentalist sure muslim

00:21:25.560 countries are getting more muslim and like they're super mad at us and like you basically can't reason 0.99

00:21:31.840 with these people because they're bewitched by their like ancient religion after everything 1.00

00:21:36.640 we've done for them i know he also okay one of my favorite things about reading these old 0.96

00:21:44.620 books that have like become cultural touchstones is how much random shit in them has been

00:21:50.020 completely memory hold so he has a whole section about the the greatest threat to the world is a 0.96

00:21:57.540 confucian islamic alliance that the real threat isn't just the asians and the muslims separately

00:22:04.500 it's that the asians and the muslims are going to team up against us okay 0.70

00:22:09.040 so his so hold on this whole theory is just like well they're both mad at us yeah so maybe they'll

00:22:15.760 team up and then he has some like this is one of the places where he does actually use statistics

00:22:19.660 He has stats on like China selling arms to Pakistan or something.

00:22:24.620 And then like actual regional experts will be like, dude, China's arms sales to the Middle

00:22:30.960 East account for about 1% of their arms and America accounts for 33% of their arms. 0.99

00:22:37.520 Yeah, I was going to say good news. 1.00

00:22:38.960 If you think that selling arms to someone makes them your ally, then we have nothing

00:22:43.620 but friends all over the world. 1.00

00:22:45.100 He also has a thing with like one of the reasons we can't trust like Middle Eastern countries 1.00

00:22:49.600 Because, like, Islamic countries are, like, more prone to violence than non-Muslim countries, right? 0.98

00:22:55.000 He's like, if you look at the statistics, Muslim countries have higher military spending for their populations. 0.98

00:23:03.660 I'm like, are you really – we're really going to do this? 1.00

00:23:07.040 Oh, shit. 1.00

00:23:07.860 From America? You're writing this in America. Okay. 1.00

00:23:09.980 So, I mean, look, not only is America's military spending unreal large, but like, yeah, we've turned the Middle East into a proxy war zone for 80 years.

00:23:23.320 So like, yeah, some of those countries are are arming up pretty reasonably.

00:23:27.820 We're only going to invade two of these countries in the next like 10 years.

00:23:30.500 So come on, everybody relax.

00:23:32.920 So this is his vision, right?

00:23:35.220 This is this is basically his core case of like this is what the next 50 years of the world is going to look like. 0.91

00:23:39.820 this islamic confucian uppity asian people and muslims right so of course the question that one

00:23:47.040 asks is like well what is his evidence for this thesis right because one of the interesting things

00:23:53.400 about the book this is another place where he caveats himself into oblivion he's making this

00:23:59.100 bold prediction about the next 50 years right but he says that anything that happened during the

00:24:05.140 Cold War doesn't really count because it's not really evidence for his thesis or evidence against

00:24:10.760 his thesis because it was like under the rubric of the Cold War. Okay. He also says that anything

00:24:16.580 that happened before the Cold War also doesn't really matter for his thesis because it was before

00:24:21.540 the rise of identity politics and it was before the rise of like globalization. Countries weren't

00:24:26.240 as connected back then. There wasn't as much travel. There wasn't as much migration. When you

00:24:31.000 think of something like World War I, you can't really put that in the civilizational paradigm

00:24:35.420 because like there were all these other things going on at the time that were like specific to

00:24:39.580 that period in history. So his rubric for understanding the entire world does not apply

00:24:45.500 if you go back five years because there are other variables that his rubric does not account for.

00:24:50.280 Exactly. As I'm reading this, I'm like crossing off periods of history in my head,

00:24:55.120 right because he's writing the book in 1996 anything before 1989 doesn't count so basically

00:25:01.820 all that leaves him with is fucking 1989 until 1995 essentially right right basically the only 0.81

00:25:08.800 options for things that can support his thesis and he spends like two chapters talking about this 0.82

00:25:14.220 is the gulf war in 1991 and the balkan war of 1993 but like kind of throughout the 90s right

00:25:21.480 So I'm going to send you another brick of text about the Gulf War.

00:25:25.480 Okay. 0.97

00:25:25.940 This is his case for why the Gulf War means that he is correct. 0.97

00:25:30.900 Here we go. 0.95

00:25:31.840 The Gulf War thus began as a war between Iraq and Kuwait, then became a war between Iraq

00:25:36.540 and the West, then one between Islam and the West, and eventually came to be viewed by

00:25:41.060 many non-Westerners as a war of East versus West.

00:25:44.900 Millions of Muslims from Morocco to China rallied behind Saddam Hussein and acclaimed him a

00:25:51.060 Muslim hero. 75% of India's 100 million Muslims blamed the United States for the war, and

00:25:58.280 Indonesia's 171 million Muslims were almost universally against U.S. military action in

00:26:04.420 the Gulf. Audacity. Arab intellectuals lined up in similar fashion and formulated intricate

00:26:11.740 rationales for overlooking Saddam's brutality and denouncing Western intervention. King Hussein 0.79

00:26:19.080 of Jordan argued, quote, this is a war against all Arabs and all Muslims and not against Iraq

00:26:25.580 alone. Facts. Drop in knowledge. Knowledge. I love that the amount of people worldwide who

00:26:34.080 opposed American intervention is like them taking sides for Islamic civilization or something. Is 0.89

00:26:39.780 that what that's supposed to be? Like, this is like very interesting in part because if you view

00:26:44.760 the gulf war as i do and i think many people do as sort of like a part of a chain of events that

00:26:51.580 ended up with the complete destruction of iraq like the rise of isis the war in syria etc

00:26:56.640 then the idea that like opposing it is something irrational or something that you would only do

00:27:04.480 if you were sort of like too tied to your muslim identity i mean just insanely wrong 0.94

00:27:11.220 insanely fucking wrong yes so reductive okay all right i'll let you go i'm all coiled up waiting 0.80

00:27:17.820 waiting to debunk this go ahead go ahead so okay one of the best articles i read really really 0.96

00:27:25.040 really good article is called the clash of civilizations an islamicist critique by a guy

00:27:30.040 named roy mataday and he has this great section on the gulf war where he points out that like

00:27:37.100 it's true that saddam hussein was like trying to do the like we're all muslims here guys yeah but

00:27:44.400 then as soon as he invaded kuwait the arab league voted to side with the united states yes egypt 0.99

00:27:50.720 syria pakistan morocco and bangladesh all sent troops turkey closed a pipeline to fuck with 0.87

00:27:57.060 iraq yeah no there was there was a like this is in sort of like islamic american relations the 0.87

00:28:02.440 Gulf War is an important symbolic turning point because it showed how many Middle Eastern actors

00:28:10.560 had aligned their interests with the United States. Right. To the point where they felt 0.89

00:28:14.540 obligated to participate actively in the war effort. Exactly. And so it's actually true that

00:28:20.800 like Saddam was pretty popular throughout the Muslim world before the Iraq War. But then all 0.87

00:28:25.540 of the Gulf states, 70 percent of the population opposed Saddam invading Kuwait because they

00:28:31.100 thought it went against islamic law egypt and morocco both were anti-saddam the only country

00:28:37.400 where the majority of the population like thought it was cool for saddam to invade kuwait was jordan

00:28:42.680 and jordan had like some specific stuff going on because there were all these rumors that israel

00:28:46.520 was going to invade jordan at the time yeah you know i mean first of all uh mike you're not

00:28:51.540 accounting for the fact that a lot of those countries you just described are torn countries

00:28:55.660 and some of them are also cleft countries the sort of like attempts to paint that part of the

00:29:02.340 world as monolithic are never-ending on the part of like the american elite and to see it come from

00:29:10.680 someone in this position who's like at least holding himself out as an expert uh on international

00:29:15.340 affairs generally it really sort of drives home this comes down from like the highest levels of

00:29:22.000 academia and government, the idea that like Muslims are one thing. They exist over there

00:29:28.120 and they are sort of representing a singular set of interests.

00:29:31.800 One of the things that I think all of his thudding prose can distract you from is that

00:29:37.440 like if you zoom out, this is one of the only pieces of evidence for his thesis, right?

00:29:42.460 We're going to have more clashes of civilizations. It is a case in which a Muslim country invaded 1.00

00:29:48.420 another muslim country and america intervened on behalf of the muslim country right right and like 0.78

00:29:55.740 some muslim countries supported it and some didn't that doesn't speak to a existential crisis 0.52

00:30:04.100 in which the west and muslims are going to be at war for the next 50 years yeah i mean ironically

00:30:10.780 he probably would have had a stronger case in this section if he had uh waited a few years right and

00:30:17.840 you get to build in the 9-11 narrative yeah i don't know if that's where you're going next but

00:30:22.340 i'm sort of curious how that factors in in your mind or or if he wrote any follow-up or if anyone

00:30:28.900 else like analyzed it in light of post 9-11 uh developments shall we say well one thing that

00:30:34.560 actually bugs me about this is because of course i mean i only heard of this book after 9-11 i think

00:30:38.500 most of the population it really became canonical for the population after 9-11 because it was

00:30:43.160 supposed to be like oh well we're you know this explains what's going on right right he barely

00:30:47.800 mentions terrorism in the book it's not actually the case that like 9-11 proves him right he doesn't

00:30:53.140 really mention the possibility of a terror attack in america his core thesis is that little

00:30:58.820 territorial skirmishes things like iraq versus kuwait which ultimately on the world stage don't

00:31:04.140 have to become a huge deal what's gonna happen with these things is states are going to step

00:31:09.520 into them on like various teams and these conflicts are going to escalate right he doesn't

00:31:14.320 really mention non-state actors he also doesn't mention oil in this book he doesn't mention like

00:31:19.460 other things that like would cause conflict among countries incredible to talk at length about the

00:31:25.320 gulf war and not mention oil that's the thing he doesn't like most conflicts between countries are

00:31:30.700 between neighboring countries over some resource right you want you want more land minerals in

00:31:36.500 the ground like that's most of world history that's what the conflicts have been between 0.92

00:31:40.020 neighboring states and that's basically what fucking the gulf war was right saddam did it 0.81

00:31:45.620 because kuwait like he owed kuwait money and he didn't want to pay them back and like kuwait was 0.78

00:31:50.120 dumping a bunch of oil onto world markets and keeping prices low and saddam was mad because

00:31:54.160 it was like cutting into his profits it's like petty dictator stuff yeah and and we got involved

00:31:59.240 because we are looking to spread freedom and democracy all across the globe america the good

00:32:04.460 guys yet again but that's that's the thing is like this fight is actually like fairly typical

00:32:09.900 yeah and he's trying to like whip it up into this meringue of like it's something completely

00:32:14.560 different and like the best way to understand the gulf war is to see it as like a fight between

00:32:19.360 civilizations and it's like you look into the specifics and it's like no man the best way to

00:32:23.600 understand it is just like the the dynamics of these specific states you know there's there's

00:32:27.660 something interesting about the fact that he doesn't mention terrorism because if you start

00:32:31.640 with this idea that in the post-Cold War era we're going to see slightly more atomized identities

00:32:37.860 you would think that you would lead that would lead to the idea that non-state actors are going 0.99

00:32:43.340 to play a significant role but because he's such a fucking basic bitch state department hack even 0.99

00:32:50.060 when he's sort of saying oh the Islamic and western worlds are going to be in conflict he 0.99

00:32:54.900 totally misses on what the nature of that conflict is going to be but then okay it gets much worse

00:33:02.400 with his second example right because the only other like thing that can support his thesis that

00:33:08.420 happens in the early 90s is the balkans yeah this actually supports his thesis slightly better in

00:33:14.060 that it's serbs who are orthodox and bosnians who are muslims and it is actually true that like a lot

00:33:20.180 of Muslim countries kind of intervened on behalf of the Bosnians and kind of went with team Bosnia.

00:33:24.960 Yeah. And then Serbia was pretty substantially backed by Russia. You know, this Balkan conflict

00:33:30.160 doesn't necessarily need to be a global conflict, but all of a sudden it becomes one. Yeah. So I'm 0.71

00:33:35.380 going to send you, this is his explanation for like why the Balkan war broke out. Okay. Probably

00:33:43.920 the single most important factor leading to the conflict was the demographic shift that took place

00:33:48.580 in Kosovo. Kosovo was an autonomous province within Serbia. In 1961, its population was two-thirds

00:33:55.660 Albanian Muslim and one-quarter Orthodox Serb. The Albanian birth rate, however, was the highest

00:34:02.240 in Europe, and Kosovo became the most densely populated area of Yugoslavia. Facing those 1.00

00:34:07.700 numbers, Serbs emigrated from Kosovo in pursuit of economic opportunities in Belgrade and elsewhere.

00:34:13.680 As a result, in 1991, Kosovo was 90% Muslim and 10% Serb.

00:34:20.020 According to Serbs, discrimination, persecution, and violence against Serbs subsequently intensified.

00:34:25.660 Numerous violent incidents took place which included property damage, loss of jobs, harassment, rapes, fights, and killings.

00:34:33.000 As a result, the Serbs claimed that the threat to them was of genocidal proportions and that they could no longer tolerate it.

00:34:39.160 So this entire sequence could have been written by Slobodan Milosevic.

00:34:43.860 Why are there all these tensions in the Balkans in the early 1990s?

00:34:48.500 Huntington's actual explanation is that Muslims were having too many babies.

00:34:53.240 I mean, I thought that I was sort of perhaps misunderstanding the point being made here.

00:34:58.440 But this quote at the end, saying that the Serbs claimed that the threat to them was of genocidal proportions,

00:35:04.600 that is itself being used to defend a genocidal impulse am i am i wrong this this this is the

00:35:12.440 rhetoric that starts to appear before ethnic cleansings right if we don't do it to them

00:35:17.680 they're going to do it to us yeah and so he says exactly the same thing about bosnians he he's 1.00

00:35:23.280 describing like the the muslim birth rates in bosnia and like bosnians are having too many

00:35:27.320 babies and he actually says this is a real quote he says ethnic expansion by one group led to 0.99

00:35:33.460 ethnic cleansing by the other he literally quotes a serbian fucking soldier saying we have to do this 0.99

00:35:40.540 to them or else they're going to come to our villages and like do it to us because there's 0.99

00:35:43.600 too many of them jesus christ he has this whole section called islam's bloody borders where he 1.00

00:35:48.960 talks about if you if you basically draw a circle around the muslim world everywhere along that 0.66

00:35:54.260 circle everywhere the muslim world intersects with other civilizations you find conflicts 0.84

00:36:00.100 he's using the term conflict very deliberately so he talks about like the chechen muslims he talks 0.98

00:36:07.180 about the fucking wygers in china and then he has this kind of conclusion that's like well 0.97

00:36:12.380 wherever you find muslims you find conflict yeah that's one way to put it right it's like well 0.99

00:36:18.040 yeah they're conflicts in the sense that like muslims are very obviously facing discrimination

00:36:23.940 like you could easily look around the world in the late 1800s and be like everywhere you find jews

00:36:28.660 You just find debates about whether Jews are, like, really bad for the population.

00:36:32.500 I don't know.

00:36:33.320 We're sort of building towards almost this, like, self-fulfilling prophecy.

00:36:37.120 Right. 0.52

00:36:37.300 Here you have this deeply influential person saying the next big conflict is between the U.S. or Western interests and the Islamic world.

00:36:45.580 It's hard to know how much of that conflict is shaped by the fact that influential people defined the conflict as us versus Islam.

00:36:54.720 This has been written up in, like, many an academic paper. 1.00

00:36:57.340 is like, once you start believing this shit, you're going to act like it. And once you start 1.00

00:37:02.540 acting like the Muslim world is like this monolith, you're going to act like it's a 1.00

00:37:07.620 threat. Right. This is actually why I'm I really object to this book still being on so many syllabi 1.00

00:37:13.300 because the average American undergrad, right, is not going to know enough about the Gulf War 0.95

00:37:20.000 or the Balkan War to know how fucking egregious these things are. I didn't quite realize we'd 0.91

00:37:25.280 get into like genocide victim blaming in this in this book. I didn't I didn't think that it got that

00:37:31.740 dark. A lot of like the basic thesis is just sort of obviously wrong. Like it doesn't account for

00:37:38.200 various geopolitical alliances that that sort of like contradict this cultural framing. Right.

00:37:44.020 Like the U.S. has what is now a long standing alliance with Saudi Arabia, despite the fact

00:37:50.920 that it's a hardliner Islamic state, the whole West v. Islam framing, it feels like it's just

00:37:57.020 this convenient thing to convey to the public because like, oh, we're actually constantly

00:38:02.720 maneuvering to find geopolitical leverage and don't really have any particular set of ideals

00:38:08.040 or beliefs other than our own power. That's not like a mission statement that people are going

00:38:12.860 to love if you put it out there. My other favorite thing about using this as an example,

00:38:16.580 Again, this is a conflict between Muslims and Orthodox people in which America intervened on behalf of the Muslims. 0.66

00:38:24.660 Right. 0.81

00:38:24.860 America teamed up with parts of the Muslim world to help out the Bosnians due to these specific circumstances going on in the Western Balkans.

00:38:34.260 Right.

00:38:34.440 Like it makes no sense to see this as civilizational terms.

00:38:37.820 And it especially doesn't make sense to see it in civilizational terms in which America sided with a different civilization.

00:38:43.760 Like there aren't really any Western versus the rest dynamics going on here. 0.98

00:38:48.920 If your thesis starts hitting this point where it's just caveat after caveat after caveat, then maybe the thesis sucks.

00:38:58.240 It's so wild to see these theorists rise to prominence on the backs of oversimplification, right?

00:39:06.620 Of just like turning every complex situation into a little soundbite.

00:39:13.140 What's also amazing to me is that he oftentimes does actually admit the weaknesses of his arguments, but like he just handwaves them away. So in in this section, he says like, yeah, yeah, like America intervened on behalf of the Muslims, but America did not send ground troops.

00:39:31.880 It's like, well, why is that? Why is that the important distinction?

00:39:36.560 Right. There's a an idea in the law called distinctions without a difference. Right. Right. When someone is trying to create differentiate between two things, they start grabbing onto any distinction they can, even if they're not meaningful distinctions. That's what he's doing here. Yes. Yes. We intervened on behalf of the Muslims. But like we didn't like super duper intervene. Right. But like your theory predicts that we would not intervene. Yeah. And yet we did. So.

00:40:00.380 And, you know, we we did put boots on the ground in Kuwait.

00:40:04.260 However, we did not conduct a full scale invasion of Iraq. 0.98

00:40:07.140 So civilizations. 0.75

00:40:09.040 There's always a line.

00:40:10.060 There's always a pretend line you can draw.

00:40:11.900 So, OK, so then our last section, the last like two chapters of the book are where he gets into like what he really wants to say.

00:40:20.960 And it's straight up like great replacement. 0.97

00:40:23.280 Like it reads like a fucking mass shooter manifesto. 1.00

00:40:26.080 Hell yeah. 1.00

00:40:26.420 So from this completely unconvincing world system of civilizations, which he then completely abandons and is like Asia and Muslims, and then he abandons the Asia part. 1.00

00:40:38.280 And then he's like, Muslims are bad, right? 0.98

00:40:40.320 And then it's like, what do we do about this? 0.96

00:40:42.620 How do we prevent this like coming wave of conflict, right?

00:40:46.480 And he basically lands on like, we need to preserve the values of the West.

00:40:52.260 Oh.

00:40:52.620 So I'm going to send you another.

00:40:54.880 I'm going to send you another.

00:40:56.420 Like a little clip from this.

00:40:57.940 Oh, this is a lot of words when you only need 14.

00:41:04.860 Rejection of the American creed means the end of the United States of America as we have known it. 0.54

00:41:10.200 It also means effectively the end of Western civilization. 0.65

00:41:12.940 If the United States is de-Westernized, the West is reduced to Europe and a few lightly populated overseas European settler countries.

00:41:22.660 This is not just a problem of economics and demography.

00:41:25.040 Far more significant are the problems of moral decline, cultural suicide, and political disunity

00:41:31.560 in the West. Oft pointed to manifestations of moral decline include 1. increases in antisocial

00:41:37.980 behavior such as crime, drug use, and violence generally. 2. family decay, including increased

00:41:44.560 rates of divorce, illegitimacy, teenage pregnancy, and single-parent families. 3. at least in the

00:41:51.260 United States a decline in social capital, that is, membership in voluntary associations and the

00:41:57.360 interpersonal trust associated with such membership. Four, general weakening of the work ethic and rise

00:42:04.080 of a cult of personal indulgence. Five, decreasing commitment to learning and intellectual activity

00:42:11.340 manifested in the United States in lower levels of scholastic achievement. Boom. How do we preserve 0.57

00:42:18.500 of the west just a bunch of deranged conservative boilerplate yeah this is this is pat buchanan 0.99

00:42:24.900 shit right this is just yes pure conservative reactionary pearl clutching moral decline moral 0.99

00:42:33.140 moral decline and well how do you measure a moral decline well uh let me just point to several 0.95

00:42:39.020 things some of which exist some of which don't bump it all together you know you have increases

00:42:45.420 in antisocial behavior such as crime drug use and violence generally all of which were plummeting at

00:42:51.600 the time he wrote this and continued to plummet right for decades right decline in social capital 0.60

00:42:56.820 that's so abstract i'm not even gonna fucking bother weakening of work ethic is just this is 0.99

00:43:01.540 just an old guy fuck a fucking old guy complaint that old guys have been saying forever it's like 0.99

00:43:06.360 the lazy kids uh don't work like we used to i knew huntington was like a conservative right 1.00

00:43:13.300 But I didn't think that he was just sort of like your base grandpa, Facebook level conservative.

00:43:19.940 I feel like an underrated critique of this book is that its conclusions do not follow from its premises at all.

00:43:27.440 Yeah.

00:43:27.700 So basically his diagnosis of the world is that we're all splitting into these civilizations along cultural lines.

00:43:34.800 But then his prescription is to emphasize what makes us different and in his mind, what makes us better than the other civilizations, right?

00:43:45.520 He talks in this passage about being de-Westernized.

00:43:49.240 And he's essentially saying like, oh, we need to like re-Westernize.

00:43:52.960 But like, why?

00:43:55.140 Right.

00:43:56.140 The future of the world is identity politics. 0.99

00:43:59.900 So we need to pick ours and I choose white. 1.00

00:44:03.740 Right.

00:44:04.800 And like, if you think about, you know, the European example, where for hundreds of years, people in France and Germany would have said we're a totally different civilization from them, right? And they're like constantly at war with each other, constantly skirmishing over like various resources and territory, etc.

00:44:22.160 And then what you have in like a fairly short period over the last 50 years, you have all of this economic integration, free movement, exchange programs where they're studying in each other's country and they're learning each other's language.

00:44:36.620 And now for basically anybody under 50 years old, the idea of France and Germany going to war with each other is this like comical, like sci-fi notion.

00:44:47.240 It makes no sense.

00:44:48.100 Looking back, it's like, oh, what what seemed to be a civilizational conflict turns out to be ultimately pretty superficial.

00:44:55.700 Yeah. And rather than include any historical context or any like mature conflict management strategies, he's basically looking around the world.

00:45:05.280 And he's like, the problem today is that everyone thinks that their own culture is superior and they're willing to go to war for it.

00:45:12.980 But it turns out that our culture is superior.

00:45:15.700 We need to demonstrate that.

00:45:17.380 That's what's interesting about this is a lot of these complaints are symptoms of a

00:45:24.540 liberalizing culture, right? Things like divorce rates. If you're Samuel Huntington and that's

00:45:32.260 your concern, then perhaps check out divorce rates in the Muslim world. 1.00

00:45:36.920 Right.

00:45:37.400 The bottom line is that a lot of the complaints about like the Islamic world are complaints

00:45:44.380 about these particularly conservative elements of the Islamic world and to see conservatives make

00:45:50.620 them on one hand and then also make the case for the rise of those conservative elements in our

00:45:56.580 own society, it's transparent. I would think that someone like Huntington would be very slightly

00:46:03.600 above that, but I suppose not. And that's what I get for giving a Harvard guy credit.

00:46:07.820 This is like one of the bullets in my notes. He says very explicitly throughout the book that

00:46:13.180 Like, one of the reasons you can tell that, like, Muslims are less civilized, one of the pieces of evidence he gives for that is he's like, look at the way that they treat women and minorities, right? 1.00

00:46:22.820 Like, you wouldn't want to be a Christian minority in a Muslim state, right, guys? 1.00

00:46:28.120 But then we get to this chapter, and it's like, what if our immigrants are, like, uniquely bad? 1.00

00:46:33.900 It's like, shouldn't you be admiring them for cracking down on their minorities? 1.00

00:46:36.620 Like, maybe their minorities are, like, going to destroy their civilization, too. 0.99

00:46:40.140 This is exactly – this is, like, Islamicist rhetoric. 1.00

00:46:43.180 Right. What happened to that complaint about Mexicans who were too angry at us for our anti-immigration laws? 0.93

00:46:50.680 Also, do you want to know what he says about Mexicans? 0.59

00:46:52.800 He does. Because I was wondering, I was like, is he going to return to this?

00:46:56.020 Sure. 0.99

00:46:56.360 He says, while Muslims pose the immediate problem to Europe, he's talking about Muslim immigrants, Mexicans pose the problem for the United States. 0.98

00:47:04.500 The central issue will remain the degree to which Hispanics are assimilated into American society as previous immigrant groups have been. 0.99

00:47:11.960 second and third generation hispanics face a wide array of incentives and pressures to do so

00:47:16.840 mexican immigration on the other hand differs in potentially important ways from other immigrations 0.99

00:47:23.140 this is my favorite fucking argument when it's like in one breath you admit you're like well 0.98

00:47:29.380 every previous immigrant group has eventually like within one generation assimilated into 0.99

00:47:34.320 american society but these new immigrants right they're not gonna assimilate it's like well this 0.99

00:47:40.320 is the same thing they said about italians russians poles and then he has this whole fucking thing 0.98

00:47:46.480 of like mexicans can't assimilate because other immigrants crossed an ocean to get to america 0.97

00:47:53.700 but mexicans crossed the land europeans were coming west right mexicans are going north they

00:48:01.140 are uh they are not going against the wind yeah i love this cross like they did they cross that

00:48:06.080 ocean thing you have guatemalans fleeing a civil war around the time that this is being uh written

00:48:13.140 walking all the way up through mexico into the united states and his position is like well that's

00:48:19.560 too easy they haven't experienced hardship you know get the fuck out so he ends the book this 0.94

00:48:25.420 is the closing paragraph he says the underlying problem for the west is not islamic fundamentalism 0.99

00:48:31.920 It is Islam, a different civilization whose people are convinced of the superiority of their culture and obsessed with the inferiority of their power. 0.95

00:48:41.120 Well, I'm glad that we are not from a culture that is convinced of its own superiority. 1.00

00:48:46.940 Could you imagine what that would be like?

00:48:48.960 I know.

00:48:49.420 People who are anxious about losing their relative position in society and who think their culture is best.

00:48:55.420 Huh.

00:48:55.940 Nope.

00:48:57.220 Don't see anybody like that around.

00:48:59.520 We're only a couple books in on this podcast when it comes to these types of like weird theory of everything books.

00:49:09.020 Yeah.

00:49:09.280 One day we will have a comprehensive theory of these dudes.

00:49:13.560 It's right. There's something so unique going on in their brain where they believe that they are capable of, like, capturing these complex phenomena, boiling them down to something simple and then throwing them out in like a quick a book that frankly should be a lengthy essay at most.

00:49:32.160 A magazine article. Right. I haven't quite figured it out yet, but I fucking will.

00:49:36.580 Well, I mean, this kind of leads us into the epilogue of the episode about the book's legacy 0.94

00:49:42.900 and kind of debunking. One of the essays about the book and about Huntington specifically that

00:49:48.660 I found really interesting was by Edward Said. And what he pointed out is that most Americans

00:49:54.480 don't know very much about different countries. The population to understand world events relies

00:50:00.860 on narratives we we need sort of a story to slot world events into and oftentimes those narratives

00:50:08.360 are supplied by elites and the the cold war was in some way a narrative that was constructed by

00:50:16.020 people like samuel huntington and saeed has like speeches by huntington in the 70s and 80s

00:50:22.580 where he just openly talks about he's like well to do the things that we wanted to do with american

00:50:27.980 military power we had to cast every single thing that happened on the world stage as like part of

00:50:33.820 the cold war that was partly a social construction like it was partly real too but it was a very

00:50:39.240 deliberate effort to create that kind of narrative for people and that's why this is like so 0.98

00:50:45.820 disconcerting because he's almost framing it like a prediction but what it is is like a fucking bat 0.81

00:50:53.960 signal to american elites yeah here's what here's what i think should be next edward saeed says 0.88

00:50:59.800 it's a brief and crudely articulated manual in the art of maintaining a wartime status in the

00:51:05.880 minds of americans that's partly what he's doing here i don't think huntington is calculated i

00:51:10.240 think he believed this stuff frankly yeah i think that the the reason elites latched onto it right

00:51:15.580 because as we've said there are a billion of these books were published right the fact that this book

00:51:19.660 became so canonical is like more interesting than the book itself.

00:51:23.500 And people latched onto this as like, oh, it's the next justification for us to keep

00:51:28.340 our military this big.

00:51:29.760 There really is this like conservative thing where they need to seek out conflict.

00:51:34.240 Right.

00:51:34.500 I think it was Corey Robin in The Reactionary Mind wrote a bunch about this.

00:51:38.260 In the 1990s, when things were like relatively peaceful, there was like an industry by the

00:51:44.780 end of the decade on the right of just sort of like think pieces about how we needed a 0.94

00:51:49.580 fight, not even saying like, oh, I think the Islamic world is next or anything like that 0.99

00:51:54.200 necessarily, but just saying that like, in general, we need a fight. 0.99

00:51:59.600 One of the reasons I really like this Edward Said essay, I mean, he wrote a couple of them,

00:52:03.400 but like his overall argument is that it has a very Marge Gunderson at the end of Fargo

00:52:09.200 thing he talks about how the the central tragedy of clash of civilizations is that it was written

00:52:16.080 this time when yes there was a power vacuum and he has this like very moving section where he

00:52:20.720 talks about like you know humanity was facing at that time a lot of common challenges like yes

00:52:27.300 there are civilizations and they do have differences but there's no inherent reason

00:52:32.740 why those differences have to lead to conflict right you could have looked for something that

00:52:38.000 hey, we can all collaborate on building a better world together. We have this wartime nuclear bombs

00:52:45.020 hanging over us curtain that has just been lifted. And instead of trying to build that world or even

00:52:51.260 entertain the idea, it's like, who are we fighting next? It's just kind of ugly. And I like that he

00:52:58.500 pointed that out, that it's not just the factual errors in Huntington's book. It's also just like,

00:53:06.080 why do this? Like, why are you like this? Yeah. And why not? Like, how could you not be if you're

00:53:13.120 like an international affairs guy, a little bit inspired by the concept that like the next era

00:53:19.280 might not be defined by like the threat of violence coming from somewhere else and the need

00:53:25.700 for us to match it with with force of our own. Right. You know, the Soviet Union falls. And

00:53:30.260 rather than looking around for who to punch next, you could be saying, wow, like maybe I could put

00:53:36.500 my guard down for a bit. Right. Wouldn't that have been a beautiful sentiment to see coming

00:53:40.420 from some of our elites at the time? Right. Like a little Marshall plan, like a global Marshall

00:53:44.240 plan of like, let's let's look at who we can help. Like, let's let's think about what things we can

00:53:49.280 work together on. Right. Anti antibacterial resistance or something like find something

00:53:54.920 fun to do together, you know? And, you know, there's something to be said for the fact that

00:53:58.100 these, you know, the two books that we've read that are essentially about this same topic in

00:54:03.060 some form or another come from Fukuyama and Huntington, who are both deeply connected with

00:54:09.880 the State Department. Right. It says something about how our elites think they come from this

00:54:16.040 Cold War era. Right. And that's where they've succeeded in a world where the U.S. is forcibly

00:54:23.680 is very invested in forcibly bullying smaller nations and and asserting itself globally at all

00:54:30.760 times if you are like an international affairs expert in 1990 that's all you know right you're

00:54:37.780 not an expert in peace you're not an expert in like prosperity you're an expert in fighting i

00:54:45.060 mean that kind of speaks to the last thing i want to talk about which is like where the book is now

00:54:49.080 Paul Musgrave, who's a political scientist, has written a bunch of essays about like the weird zombie longevity of this book.

00:54:57.000 Right. It's like it's assigned in introductory classes.

00:55:01.080 He acknowledges the fact that like a lot of professors who assign this book would also talk about critiques of it and they're not necessarily endorsing it.

00:55:07.580 And like that's kind of what college is for. Right.

00:55:09.800 Is to like talk about paradigms that are no longer relevant.

00:55:12.460 But also this book is assigned more than Aristotle.

00:55:15.880 right do we need this book in every introductory class right it's it's been totally debunked like

00:55:24.820 every time you have a book like this in a classroom it's like there are books that are

00:55:29.340 correct that you're not assigning like there's a slot on a syllabus that you're wasting on a wrong

00:55:35.900 book that you know he emphasizes that like no scholars take this seriously and samuel huntington

00:55:42.320 his next book was called who are we the challenges to america's national identity and he published

00:55:49.340 an excerpt of it in foreign policy in 2004 that was headlined the hispanic challenge oh boy he 0.94

00:55:56.240 became a total fucking crank later in his life we know this and like we're all supposed to pretend 0.97

00:56:02.340 that he wrote this book based on his like academic analysis of world affairs and not his like ugly 0.98

00:56:08.840 grandpa xenophobia there's only one circumstance we should be teaching this book and it's as

00:56:13.820 essentially a proof that there's no such thing as an international affairs expert right don't you

00:56:19.000 know don't be like samuel huntington this was an embarrassing time for all of us let's move on to 0.93

00:56:23.040 to the real shit so i want to end with this quote from paul musgrave he says the longevity of 0.91

00:56:28.300 huntington's thesis becomes more explicable when we treat it not as scholarship aimed at skeptics 0.98

00:56:33.080 but as a sermon to the faithful the creed that huntington and his audience share holds that

00:56:37.780 civilizations exist as unchanging cultural organisms, that the rise of other regions

00:56:42.560 threatens Western civilization, and that a successful Western response requires purity

00:56:47.140 at home and separation from the rest. These are not factual assertions. They are unfalsifiable

00:56:52.320 axioms. Trying to fact-check Huntington's more specific claims is useful, but shouldn't lead us

00:56:57.200 to miss the larger point of his project. Huntington's myriad bigotries are not deviations

00:57:02.160 from a generally sound approach. Rather, they sit at the heart of the book's appeal. Huntington's

00:57:07.080 civilizational paradigm complements his nativism, his hostility to social change,

00:57:11.480 and his profound lack of interest in economics and politics. As long as a constituency that

00:57:16.400 subscribes to its axioms can be found, clash-style logic will survive, no matter how costly or

00:57:22.380 dangerous its prescriptions may be. Wow, fucking owned. Owned. I do think it's notable that this 0.99

00:57:29.200 is in many ways a normative text, right? It's prescriptive. It is not simply that he is trying

00:57:36.900 to say, hey, this is what I think is happening in the world. He is writing a prescription for a

00:57:43.300 more reactionary and isolated United States. One that's more defensive, more aggressive towards

00:57:52.520 specific cultures. It's not just him saying, here's the world as I see it. It's here's the

00:57:58.480 world as I want it to be. You sound like somebody in the midst of a dire moral decline, Peter.

00:58:04.220 Typical.

00:58:06.900 Bye.

If Books Could Kill - February 23, 2023

The Clash of Civilizations

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